XXI
NATIONAL PARKS THE SCHOOL OF NATURE
Why not each year send thousands of school-children through the National Parks? Mother Nature is the teacher of teachers, these Parks the greatest of schools and playgrounds. No other school is likely so to inspire children, so to give them vision and fire their imagination. Surely the children ought to have this extraordinary opportunity.
The percentage of children aroused and started to greatness by schools of prison-like policy is small indeed. The proper place for at least a part of every child's schooling is the great outdoors. In our great National Parks we have an unrivaled outdoor school that is always open; in it is a library, a museum, a zoölogical garden, and a type of the wilderness frontier. In this school-children are brought into contact with actual things, and become personally acquainted with useful facts, instead of merely reading about them. No better surroundings can be devised for developing common sense.
Learning under such conditions is delightful, yet it is discipline—a discipline that develops, not mere drudgery that discourages. Education cannot be separated from enjoyment. "Let us live for our children," said Froebel, the early exponent of the school of Nature. It is doubtful if we could do more for our young folk, for the nation, and for humanity than to have ample National Parks and opportunities for the children to enjoy them.
If each boy or girl—or any traveler—were to follow a particular line of nature-study during vacations, and give most of his time to one species of tree, flower, bird, or to the characteristic scenic feature of the region visited, each would return with a new and pleasant resource, and would have something definite and worth while to report to his friends.
One of the greatest inheritances of each individual is imagination. The child instinctively believes in fairies. Unfortunately, the imagination too often is stifled and extinguished in childhood. It is imagination that "bodies forth the forms of things unknown," and makes all objects interesting. It lights the path of education and throws changing color and romance over every act and scene in life. It gives a magic spell to existence. This matchless torch may be set blazing by a visit to the wonderland of a National Park where wilderness is king—where the fairies live.
Often, the chief incentive that starts a child toward the acquiring of an education is interest in this fairyland of Nature. Interest is the highroad to education. Interest the mind and it will grow like a garden. The National Parks have, through this fact, an educational value which entitles them to be ranked among the strongest potential forces of our pedagogical system.
I have never known any one who had enjoyed the pleasure that comes from even a little knowledge of natural history to sink into the empty-headed pastime of trying to see crude forms in Nature's story-book. Usually, an individual given to this, when on an outing, is a bore to his companions. I simply cannot understand how people find pleasure in trying to discover animal forms, or various zoölogical figures, in the geological formations of the mountains, while the beholders are in the midst of a thousand objects of real interest. Such an exercise may be called humbug imagination.